Toy vehicles have long been prized by children and have helped children pass a generous number of pleasing hours during their childhood. There have been many kinds of toy vehicles and a great number of these have been wind-up toys. Wind-up toy vehicles, in general, utilize a spring wound motor to drive a set of wheels and thereby impel the vehicle over the ground. There have also been a number of flywheel driven toy vehicles which, essentially, utilize a spinning flywheel or inertia motor to provide the power to move a set of wheels and drive the vehicle over the ground. In either case, power must be provided to the vehicle by some sort of turning mechanism which either winds the spring motor or provides motion to the flywheel.
In the case of a spring motor driven vehicle, power is usually provided by use of a winding key which protrudes through the external portion of the vehicle. With a flywheel driven vehicle, it is difficult to use an external key because the flywheel must be turned quite rapidly, in most cases, to store inertia; and the vehicle must be placed on the ground as quickly as possible in order for the inertia of the flywheel to be utilized without a substantial loss of power. In many cases this problem has been, to some extent, overcome by connecting the wheels of the vehicle directly to the flywheel through a set of step-up gears. If the vehicle is pushed quite rapidly over the ground, the flywheel is set in motion. However, the optimum step-up gearing arrangement to allow the flywheel to run for any substantial period is too great to allow this method of application of power if the vehicle is to run for a substantial period of time.
Various launching systems have therefore been devised to impart motion to the toy vehicles. Examples of such prior art vehicles and launching systems are shown in the following United States patents:
U.S. Pat. No. 2,050,892 L. Marx--Aug. 11, 1936 PA1 U.S. Pat. No. 2,731,765 R. N. Carver--Jan. 24, 1956 PA1 U.S. Pat. No. 3,707,805 G. H. Buck--Jan. 2, 1973 PA1 U.S. Pat. No. 3,735,525 M. J. Freed--May 29, 1973 PA1 U.S. Pat. No. 3,789,538 D. E. Spengler, et al--Feb. 5, 1974 PA1 U.S. Pat. No. 3,803,756 N. S. Strongin--Apr. 16, 1974 PA1 U.S. Pat. No. 3,886,682 M. Ieda, et al--June 3, 1975 PA1 U.S. Pat. No. 3,959,920 M. Ieda, et al--June 1, 1976 PA1 U.S. Pat. No. 4,087,935 R. C. Edmission, et al--May 9, 1978
None of this prior art discloses a means for rapidly imparting extremely high speeds to a flywheel driven toy vehicle so that the vehicle will operate for long periods.